For someone who is used to Java, Dart is indeed the easiest way to get into web development. It's kind of a mix between Java and JavaScript. Nonetheless it still makes sense to learn JavaScript first since you need to be able to use a JS game engine from within Dart.

You could also use Scala. The Scala.JS project looks very promising. I played around with it and the js files it produces are about the same size as in Dart, the performance is similar too.You can try it out interactively herehttp://www.scala-js-fiddle.com/

The big advantage here is that you can run your Scala code either on the JVM or compile it to JS and run it in the browser.

There's the fundamental problem with meta-languages and, indeed, DSLs... when everyone starts just inventing their own dialects to solve problems, yes, wonderful, we get very concise and sometimes less leaky abstractions for our problems. However the rest of the world looks on in bemusement wondering what it all means. There's a happy medium somewhere in between which turns out to be popular because it seems to fit more peoples' minds more easily, and that's why we're stuck with nice simple OOP/procedural/imperative languages largely with smatterings of functional.

I full endorse ugly bits. And I spend about 90% of my time in 'lesser' languages because I can find one that's a good sweet-point of productivity vs. expressability. (And it would be more like 99% of the time if Mathematica wasn't the most awesome piece of software ever written). If the JVM would just added those few important missing pieces...I'd be happy heathen.

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